What if you knew of someone whose
word was untrustworthy and who had a complete disregard for his own reputation
for honesty. Would you act upon what that person told you? What if that person
had endless money to deliver the dishonest message to you again and again, over
and over?

Welcome to the world of SuperPACs
and their television advertisements. We had a good example of their operation in
the 2014 race for governor.

The Massachusetts Office of
Campaign and Political Finance reported that Independent Expenditure
“SuperPACs” spent more than the gubernatorial candidates themselves in 2014. Charlie
Baker’s campaign reported $5.6 million in expenditures; over $11 million in
Super PAC money went to supporting Baker. Martha Coakley’s campaign spent $3.9
million and about $6.9 was expended by SuperPACs on her behalf.

The primary activity of the
SuperPACs is negative advertising.

The late Professor Wilson Carey
McWilliams contended that for speech to serve democracy there must be the trust
that one is not being deceived. Consider one anti-Coakley Super PAC ad run by
Commonwealth Future Independent Expenditure PAC. The mismanagement at the
Department of Children and Families was on the public’s mind. An activist group
had sued the state over DCF’s management and Attorney General Coakley defended
the state, arguing that the DCF would be better off following a state
corrective plan and not diverting funds into the suit. The Super PAC ran an ad
representing that Coakley was responsible for the deaths of children under the
care of DCF. An editorial in The
Berkshire Eagle newspaper termed the ad “loathsome even by Super PAC
standards.”

The funder of the Commonwealth
Future Independent Expenditure PAC was the Republican Governors Association.
The top
ten 2014 contributors to the Republican Governors Association were Koch
Industries, Las Vegas Sands (Sheldon Adelson), ETC Capital, Duke Energy,
Elliott Management, KSL Capital Partners, NextEra Energy, Blue Cross/Blue
Shield, Wynn Resorts, and Citadel LLC. The president of the SuperPAC, who
appears in the legal disclaimer for the ad, was Beth Lindstrom. The Boston Globe tried
to reach her and the SuperPAC to inquire about the ad. “Lindstrom did not respond to calls for comment. A
spokeswoman for the PAC said the ad “speaks for itself.” There is your
accountability for you.

On the other side a Democratic SuperPAC
named Mass Independent Expenditure PAC and funded by the Mass Teachers
Association, Democratic Governors Association, SEIU, and AFSCME ran an ad essentially
accusing Baker of being a liar, saying one thing in public and doing the
opposite as an official. In a series of ads Baker was accused of coddling the
NRA, underfunding and ignoring education, running a patronage operation, boosting
his own pay while jacking up premiums as a health care executive, engaging in a
corrupt pay to play scheme, and on and on. The SuperPACs’ ads and other materials
attacking Baker is still online here.

Candidates anticipate future
dealings in politics and parties are permanent institutions. Thus they have an
interest in preserving their reputations and are at least somewhat restrained
in their use of negative ads, which tend to blowback at the delivering candidate
or party. Not so for SuperPACs.

Professor Dante Scala has
observed that SuperPACs are more likely to deliver negative messages than are
candidates or parties because the public’s opinion of SuperPACs can’t get any
lower. This tears at the fabric of the trust a democratic audience should have
in the speaker – a reputational trust recognized as far back as Aristotle in
his Rhetoric. Given that SuperPACs
now deliver more message than do candidates or parties, this is
distressing. Super PACS can be divorced
from reputation and truth while exerting the brute force of huge television
advertising buys.

McWilliams argued that the
dependence on television advertisements reduces citizen involvement and
produces a politics in which leaders relate to their constituents largely
though media. “That is closer to the model of totalitarian parties than it is
to traditional democratic ideals.”